NEW YORK – Tarik Skubal grew up in Arizona, pitched collegiately in the Pacific Northwest and has pitched in all sorts of conditions as a Tiger. Pitching in the heat is not going to aggravate him. Still, Skubal tends to sweat through jerseys quickly, prompting clubhouse manager Dan Ross to leave extras available for him to change through as his game goes on. Usually, Skubal heads into a summer game with three jerseys on hand, and he’ll change every other inning while the clubhouse staff runs the old jersey through the dryer. On Tuesday night at Yankee Stadium, with a heat advisory looming around New York, the Tigers had four Skubal jerseys ready just in case. Turns out Skubal didn’t need them; he changed jerseys only once. The air conditioning in the visitors’ dugout was going strong. And the way Skubal was dealing, he wasn’t out in the heat for long. Nor were his teammates. “When Skub's rolling, he's pounding the zone, he's striking people out, but it's not taking too long, either,” Kerry Carpenter said after the Tigers’ 9-3 win over the Yankees. “It feels like you're out there and then back in pretty quickly.” As Skubal rolled through the Yankees’ lineup, all the heat was coming from him. He retired 13 consecutive batters, nine by strikeout, after Ben Rice’s first-inning homer. Skubal changed jerseys after the fifth inning, then allowed an unearned run in the sixth. Had Skubal gone out for the seventh inning, he might have switched back. But the way the Tigers were rolling, they didn’t need him to. It was a masterful bit of revenge for the two-time reigning American League Cy Young Award winner, and it held up Skubal’s end of what was expected to be a pitching duel opposite Yankees ace Cam Schlittler. Four Tigers home runs off Schlittler, two from Riley Greene, turned the potential duel into a runaway.
